I, just now, am rediscovering the use of microblogging. I have looked at Twitter an microblogging in the past and found it unnecessary. I had an identi.ca account for some months now, but I did not use it very often. But I had the feeling that it could be useful.

I think it is. I have looked at Twitter and how it was used. Twitter is the Myspace of microblogging. In Germany also politicians and VIPS use Twitter now and its really crap what most of them do. This is because this way microblogging is just a way to follow VIPs. Another usage seems to be to communicate with your friends. This can be partly useful, but more for things that should be public like organizing a barbecue. Still then the big question is if you want the whole world to follow your stupid little barbecue?

There is yet another way to use microblogging. That is as a replacement of IRC chat. In the past people met in IRC to organize events, then a chat log was saved and published. But this is not asynchronous. People did use IRC asynchronous by using a mix of screen+irssi to be always on as a user on a server and read messages when they wanted. Identi.ca allows be to create and join groups or follow a user. Groups do not exist on Twitter. Groups are depersonalising microblogging. This means you rather follow a topic in a group sense rather than a single person or just a tag.

So if we talk about a group we just have a fresh one called !SFD. This allows people to join a community without having to register on another web page. They can follow messages passively or simply add their 5 cents by posting with !SFD, too.

The nice thing about microblogging is, that its not only asynchronous and open but also web accessible. This means that it has a low entry barrier. Everybody can read the messages, even if she does not understand what is going on. IRC will never gain a lot more attention.

Identi.ca has a gateway to Jabber Instant Messaging. This allows me to get a message immediately after it was sent – and also for me to send messages via jabber to the open microblogging sphere. This means that microblogging has a instant messaging functionality

Microblogging is also similar to Blogging which the name already says. Its messages are a lot shorter. Usually < 140 characters. This is not much and I also think it might be nice to be able to extend this limit. Not for microblogging itself but maybe to link to microblogging with a short summary of a full blog post. You can talk about everything in 140 characters.

I think microblogging is an interesting technology, especially with the AGPL/GPL3 licensed Laconica that drives identi.ca.

I am still testing the limits and to find out what you can or can not do with it.